Review of Vocal Break by Lauren Elkin – a celebration of the female voice | Music books

When Lauren Elkin was a child, she studied with a voice teacher in Northport, Long Island, who made her perform in the mirror. Singing songs from the Italian classical repertoire, Elkin – who was a soprano – had to smile and raise her eyebrows as she sang because “it helps with the placement”. He was told that his breathing should not come from the chest but from the diaphragm, and that he should be able to smooth out the vocal folds, where chest sounds turn into head sounds.

Elkin tried to keep his voice “inaudible” even though he secretly wanted to rebel. In retrospect, he wishes he had understood that he “could have worked with, not against, the flaws in my words…

In Vocal Break, Elkin explores the female voice in all its forms and weaknesses. Using musicians who shaped or moved her – Cyndi Lauper, Cynthia Erivo, Tori Amos, Beyoncé, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and others – she examines the rules and expectations placed on female musicians and the ways in which they fought against them.

Why Elkin, a French-American translator living in London and author of Flâneuse and Art Monstersman to do this? Because, he writes, “I’m not a writer. I’m a musician who started writing.” Although his book is more than just a memoir, Elkin remembers his past as he analyzes musicians and sings through his musical interests, both as a professional and as a listener. He explores the concepts of selfishness, coolness, loyalty and trustworthiness, the limitations of the genre and the impact of the changes in pop music and musical theater on the voice. He considers the history of the vocoder and the latest version of Auto-Tune: although he calls himself “Auto-Tune dubious”, he wins with the technical support of Charli xcx on the 2024 years of Brat’s description “where his voice is still there, filtered on the machine, and finished with a real scale.

What makes Elkin’s study interesting is the fact that women’s use of their voices “is not a neutral opinion but a hard-earned right” and that judgments about their voices are combined with power and knowledge. For thousands of years, they have been separated, comforted and held to a different standard than men. Even today, they are criticized for being too loud, quiet, bolshie, too timid. Such judgment of sound and power is not limited to musicians. Women who speak in public, especially politicians, are similarly criticized – often called shrill if they dare to speak passionately. There’s a reason why Margaret Thatcher employed a vocal coach to help her tone down her voice and increase her appeal and authority.

Elkin is adept at conveying subtle expressions of words on the page. She finds Lauper’s voice to have a “glamorous metal edge” while Hanna’s is “stubborn, sing-song-y, nasal, sarcastic, loud, flamboyant — everything that men despise about women’s voices — and very effective if you want to advance feminist causes, challenge gender norms, and subvert society.”

Vocal Break was also developed in a multidisciplinary study, taking Roland Barthes’s The Grain of the Voice, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and Homer’s Odyssey. Strange things appear, such as the French expression for singing in a foreign language: sing in yogurtor “singing in yogurt”. Readers may be drawn to entrepreneur and music publisher Guillaume Biro’s account of Édith Piaf performing at the Olympia in 1956, which goes beyond the five-star standard: “An indescribable joy burns in my temple and my heart beats faster,” he says. “I explode into an orgasm like I’ve never experienced before, which leaves me on my knees in my chair.”

Elkin does not offer a broader view of the female voice beyond that women’s vocal styles are rich and varied, subject to inappropriate editing and criticism and often neglected by the music business. All true, if not surprising. Even more unacceptable is the physical abuse women have endured for daring to sing and be on stage. The band’s guitarist, Viv Albertine, said: “People didn’t know whether to kill us or kill us,” when Tori Amos was sexually assaulted by a man who wanted her to sing to him. In Afghanistan, women are not allowed to sing in public, they are forbidden to make their voices heard outside the house.

At the heart of this book is not only an in-depth analysis but also a deep appreciation of music and how it represents expression and freedom. “I think more people should sing,” Elkin says. “Singing is wanting something that we can’t get, that’s why we love it, I want it. We also want things that we can’t get, and sometimes, through music, we can get it, or feel like we have it, for the time that the song is there.”